I was about to buy personal license for construct 2 on steam for many reasons: there is a lot of payment options, and not to mention that Construct 2 price on Steam is about 25% less than on Scirra store, at least here in my country. But, unfortunately it seems that some users are experiencing some problems with the Steam version. Despite having done enough research here in the Forum, I could not get an idea if purchasing from Steam, I will have to go through the problems that others are facing. Some users say they have no problem with Steam version, others say they have. It gets complicated when the user need support and is caught in the middle of this situation...

Quoting g3nki:

Unfortunately, I don't know if this is a "steam"-specific issue as I haven't been able to isolate the bug. And I can see your point Kyatric. But as a consumer I still think it is Scirra's responsibility to solve this issue with Valve/Steam. If I went to Steam Support now, they would probably redirect me to you guys and it will be an endless blame-game in which I am caught up in the middle. The only thing I know is that I have bought Construct 2 and it doesn't work very well. (unfortunately).

I totally agree with g3nki. Who decided to sell construct 2 on Steam was Scirra. So i think they should consider support steam users in the same way. If there is a problem with Steam, this should be solved by Scirra or at least by a joint effort with Steam to solve it. What makes no sense, it is the user not knowing where to turn.

I ended up here:- Is there any difference between Scirra and Steam versions?- If Steam is not the proper place to run Construct 2, why not remove it from Steam?- I'm totally confused about what to do in this situation.

I would like to buy Construct 2 personal from Steam, but only if I can be sure that I will not regret.

artbava wrote:I would like to buy Construct 2 personal from Steam, but only if I can be sure that I will not regret. Any help will be pretty much appreciated.

Hi and welcome artbava,

I actually think it's worth getting an original license. From my experience Construct 2 is very reasonably priced when you think about all the functionality it provides. The downsides of the steam-version are just too many:

Steam must be running

If you double-click on a capx-file or a project file, the 'free edition' will open (as it will not undergo the Steam License validation.)

You can't open up a steam game while Construct 2 is opened

The license cannot be exchanged for a normal one.

And worst of all, the increased risk och stuttering, sluggishness and freezes. I have had the Steam version almost a year, and this bug has been there since that time (even though the freezes and slowdowns was dramatically reduced by switching off auto-save)

No Auto-save (if your having the trouble described in this thread)

Steam version of Construct, at its current state, isn't running as well as the stand alone license. And even if it were, it will still have limitations that you can't get around. I think you will regret not buying the one here, even though it costs 25€ more. 25€ isn't actually that much, when you think about the downsides with the steam version.

Hope this will help you in your decision. I really love Construct 2, and I think it is one of the greatest 2D game creation tools out there. But unfortunately the Steam version should only be considered an ad for the product rather than the product. (Most of the downsides aren't even Scirra's fault)

Currently working on "Unsung" - an open world platform adventure for PC and Consoles. follow me on Instagram :D

One last thing before giving this bug over to @Ashley.In the past there were some bug reports about the Steam release where the Steam Overlay affected functions of C2, maybe the overlay is affecting the autosave function this time?

I think you are using C2 more than I do currently, might want to test it out with disabling the Steam Overlay while autosave is enabled?(How to: Right click on C2 in your library > Click on propeties > Uncheck the checkbox which says "Activate Steam Overlay Ingame")

If this is not "fixing" the bug either, we can be sure that this is a C2 bug and not Steam.

G3nki, could you test what TheRealDannyyy said about Steam Overlay affecting autosave, and post here?

TheRealDannyyy, if i understand your point, there is no difference between Scirra and Steam versions, at least as regards the functionality of Construct 2, isn't it? Btw, which version do you have?

Best wishes!

The most of the disadvantages are true.I bought a personal license because I use Steam all the time and it also gives you the comfort not to check for updates every time you start C2, Steam autoupdates C2 for you at the same time as the update has been released here. (It even says that your C2 has been updated and asks you if you want to see the changelog.)You can also change to the beta of C2 at anytime by just a few clicks which is nice too.

So if you are more the Steam guy like I am, I recommend the C2 version on Steam because from the game development side, it is exactly the same as on the website.However if you are up for sales and want to grab it cheaper than usual you should wait for a scirra store price drop which happens sometimes. (Christmas deals etc.)

artbava wrote:G3nki, could you test what TheRealDannyyy said about Steam Overlay affecting autosave, and post here?

I deactivated the overlay for the application and it doesn't help with the autosave feature turned on. The application still freezes after about 18 minutes of use (independent of workload). Sorry for being a bit harsh on the Steam version, like TheRealDannyyy mentioned, the issue with playing games while construct is running is actually solved now. (I didn't know)

Auto-updates are nice, even though I have turned them off, because first I wan't to make sure that the installed plugins works with the new version. And talking about plugins, if you're going to work with animations I think BrashMonkey's Spriter is a really good complementary vector animation tool for Construct 2. Perhaps you can find a boundle if you're interested in both applications.

Currently working on "Unsung" - an open world platform adventure for PC and Consoles. follow me on Instagram :D

g3nki wrote:Auto-updates are nice, even though I have turned them off, because first I wan't to make sure that the installed plugins works with the new version. And talking about plugins, if you're going to work with animations I think BrashMonkey's Spriter is a really good complementary vector animation tool for Construct 2. Perhaps you can find a boundle if you're interested in both applications.

Ok then, @Ashley I think we've found the bug.@g3nki updated the description and all required information is given. (Teleport me there!)We hope you find and fix the bug as soon as you got a break from working on C3.

Thanks for the fast response to all of my questions @g3nki and thanks for reportingthis else I would've just go on using C2 with this issue forever.(P.s. @g3nki you can also add Windows 7 with the latest drivers and updates installed in the description, thx.)

This bug makes very little sense to me. The Steam version of C2 is for all intents and purposes identical to the standalone version. The sole difference is that it doesn't read a license from c2license.txt like the standalone version, it communicates with Steam. It seems unlikely this relatively trivial change could cause such a serious degradation of performance over time. Further, the autosave system is certainly identical between the Steam and standalone versions of C2, so I am at a loss as to what the problem could be. I presume it must be something about the Steam client or the way it launches C2. Further still, as far as I know most Steam users use it successfully without this type of issue, so it seems unlikely that we could reproduce it (and I never have).

I think Steam does some things to the programs it launches. It's designed for games and the "in-game Steam overlay" is enabled by default. Turning that off is almost certainly a good idea since it's designed for games and might just be incompatible with C2. I think it does some other things though, like at least timing how long it's running for play time stats, and possibly other behind-the-scenes alterations. I have no idea what any of these things could be, what to do about them, or how they could interact with autosave to cause any problems. (Autosave is basically a lightly modified version of the 'Save' button that just directs the result to a different file. If the problem does not reproduce by clicking 'Save', then I am pretty sure it really is just a random problem that only interacts with autosave by chance, rather than actually being anything specific to autosave).

The symptoms sound something like a memory leak, but from the numbers you have reported, there is no corresponding increase in CPU or memory. I'd expect either the CPU usage would keep increasing (such as having to process a longer and longer list every frame), or memory usage keeps increasing (exhausting memory, caches and falling back to disk). Either would explain degrading performance, but neither seems to be the case. So no leads there either.

I'd email Valve but they rarely email me back. These days they have thousands and thousands of developers using the store, and their focus is probably on their AAA games.

If you are happy to work around it by disabling autosave, then that is OK I guess, but I feel like it's probably a random issue that may still happen in other ways. If you absolutely cannot use the product at all, then unfortunately we can't issue a refund, since all Steam purchases are processed by Valve - your only course of action would be to obtain a refund for Construct 2 from Steam and purchase again directly from our site.

Thank you for your response @Ashley. I fully understand the way you're reasoning, without being able to reproduce the bug it's nearly impossible to find the cause. The good thing about this thread is that we have actually found a workaround. With the auto-save turned off I can work for a whole day straight feeling confident that Construct won't freeze. With auto-save turned on however I need to restart or force the application to shut once every 20 minutes. The strange thing that it doesn't matter which platform I use, the bug is always the same (even though my desktop computer cope with the slowdown a bit better).

The Steam Overlay doesn't do anything in my experience, but I have disabled it as it is utterly useless in construct. I'm actually quite happy with the workaround, I can actually live with that. But I'm thinking about asking for a refund just to catch the attention of Steam support, and shed some light on the issue. It has been reported before, and we're a couple of people experiencing it (god knows how many, I waited almost a year before I reported)

Thank you @TheRealDanny for pointing me in the right direction for a good workaround, as well as being committed in this thread.

Currently working on "Unsung" - an open world platform adventure for PC and Consoles. follow me on Instagram :D